Birth of a fashion nation

A model presents a creation by French fashion designer Christian Lacroix for Elsa Schiaparelli at the Haute Couture shows, on July 1, 2013 in Paris.Photo by
Francois Guillot

Another season of mannequins performing in expensive fashion finery is on show in Paris this week, as the haute couture shows get under way. The medium and its message – the fashion show, caught on film and in photographs – is over a century old and in the 21st century, the runway show is an event – a spectacle of set design, visual art and a bag of tricks mixed in.

“Although people are trying all these different ways of showing (now) in parallel with, they’re not actually replacing the fashion show,” Caroline Evans, a professor of fashion history and theory at London’s Central Saint Martins, explains on the phone from New York, where she’s doing archive research.

“My first thinking was actually from the 1880s those [Eadward] Muybridge and Marey photographs of motion, the sort of chronos photography of the 1880s,” she continues. “As I worked on the subject I found dance and music history and performance history much more useful for this. The whole thing is about a kind of performativity, really.”

As thick with theory as it is with rare photographs, The Mechanical Smile is a rigorous departure from the usual pop-fashion coffee table book. As the saying goes, plus ça change — and that goes for the phalanx of street style snappers and stars on parade on show in the streets of Paris, then as now.

These days, the peacocking posse preen against the familiar gravel backdrop of the Tuileries. Their sartorial ancestors in the society set were photographed at the races, or taking a walk on a style-conscious stretch of the Bois de Boulogne called Le Sentier de la Vertu.

All wasn’t always as it seemed, Evans cautions, for example with the Seeberger Brothers photographing fashionable women they had singled out from the crowds at the races. “You don’t know with them who is a society woman and who is a mannequin,” she says, because couture houses stealthily employed models to mingle at events while wearing the clothes. It’s not unlike the street style stars who are given clothes by emerging or behemoth fashion labels to mix in with their outrageous outfits, all in the hopes of some buzz for the brand. “There’s a lovely description by Lartigue when he says the women who don’t have a protector to chase them away from taking their picture, they just smile at him because that’s what they’re paid to do, those must be the mannequins.”

But it wasn’t just what the women – who Evans dubs ‘living objects’ – wore that influenced fashion, it was the way they wore them – the clothes influenced motion (as with one walk necessary to show off Poiret’s Empire-line gowns of autumn 1911 to best effect), captured in the photographs and early fashion reels of the day. “Not wearing a corset really changes the way you move,” she says, “not just the way you look. And so mannequins were really useful for that too, because obviously they’re seen in motion.”

Thus, these turn-of-the-century mannequins also pioneered a fashionable new slinking slouch that influenced social walking and theatrical performance at home and abroad. One reproduction in The Mechanical Smile, of a Chicago Daily Tribune fashion spread from 1912, shows readers how to achieve one such new walk: the ‘ ingenue crouch,’ a type of “wiggly, wobbly ambling stride” that was all the rage, and supplanted the athletic American woman’s walk with the smaller steps of the Parisienne, Evans writes. The newspaper’s instructions feature Muybridge-like stop-action photography.

“It coincides in the early 20th century with the idea of being modern being in motion,” Evans says of the resemblance between fashion shoot photographs with early cinema reels and stop-action photography sequences. Even today, runway shows exist as films, of sort, streamed in real time on the internet, internationally.

“I was always making that link with the Duchamp ‘Nude descending a staircase’ with a fashion show as being almost like a film strip,” she says. “And then I was amazed when I read Femina to find that that visual language was being used in features on sport for women, and dancing – the how to do the tango one has a little sort of film strip of the tango poses down the side of the main picture. There’s a really strong link there to cinema and there’s an interest across popular culture about how to visualize motion and how to make stills look as if they’re moving.”

“And I think for me it was a way of bringing together the ideas about the aesthetic of modernism – which is a sort of machine aesthetic, of making bodies look identical, and move mechanically,” Evans adds. “The modernist glamour exists in the active emptiness of the model’s performance, the abstraction. The whole couture house is just the tip of the iceberg of this huge well-oiled machine.”

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